Brothers by Yu Hua A Novel

A bestseller in China, Brothers is an epic and wildly unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running amok.

Here is China as we've never seen it before, in a sweeping, Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble Chinese history, from the madness of the Cultural Revolution to the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two comically mismatched stepbrothers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne'er-do-well, and the bookish, sensitive Song Gang, who vow that they will always be brothers—a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China.

Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.

Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China. He finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. He has published four novels, six collections of stories, and three essays collections. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. His novel To Live was awarded Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998, and To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant were named two of the last decade's ten most influential books in China. Yu Hua lives in Beijing.From the Hardcover edition.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Brothers

Kirkus Reviews

The lives of two stepbrothers, temperamental opposites nevertheless sworn to love and protect each other, are traced, in exuberant and exhausting detail, in this massive novel, originally published in Taiwan in two volumes in 2005 and 2006.

The Guardian

Somehow repulsed by Baldy Li's lack of romantic finesse (he hires a gang of street urchins to serenade her with the mating call "Baldy Li wants to have intercourse with you"), she opts instead for Song Gang.

MostlyFiction Book Reviews

We learn that Baldy Li unknowingly repeated his birth father’s stinky feat, but while Baldy Li lived long to tell about it, his old man actually perished in the act, leaving Baldy Li’s mother, Li Lan, a widow who had lost face in their town.